Giuseppe Berardi left Bivona, Sicily, at 16 and came to Britain in search of work as a miner. Some years later his wife, Concettina, joined him. Their son Antonio was born in Grantham—also the hometown of Margaret Thatcher—and the Berardis had turned to a source of income that supported many first-generation Italian families: selling gelato. Antonio said this collection “was looking back. They had no money, but they were determined to look their best. Relatives in America would send clothes, and they remade and embroidered what they had.”

Thus the patchwork and splicing of many pieces here. To the melancholic trombone of “Speak Softly Love,” The Godfather theme song (Bivona is close to Corleone), we saw an opening section of Prince of Wales–based tailoring-inspired pieces patched with waves of olive, pink, black, and white. A complexly hemmed dress in a metallic floral brocade bordered by scarlet silk was worn beneath a fabulously cut double-breasted jacket with scarlet piping that seemed to meld into its fellow garment. A sort of shirtdress-parka hybrid and a parka worn over another complexly hemmed dress came in a fil coupe pattern and resembled the faded and torn wallpaper in a dilapidated Sicilian palazzo. The fabrication of dresses in linen and cotton voile—sometimes simply checked in blue or more knottily patterned in a vaguely Italian restaurant–tablecloth red—was a conscious evocation of simplicity that was simultaneously belied by the focused complexity of Berardi’s design. A penultimate black section featured broderie anglaise, silk dresses with sheer cutaway sections, and the cousin of that earlier jacket—here in black with a sheer sleeve and shoulder, cinched by a belt-cummerbund hybrid.